TO)pot 2023

Festival of radical soundwalks
28 Sep – 1 Oct 2023
Cukrarna and public spaces

Participating artists: a l l j a , Elena Biserna, Catherine Clover, Amanda Gutiérrez, Ida Hiršenfelder, Jata C, katrinem, Aldo Milohnić, Boštjan Perovšek, Irena Pivka, Anna Raimondo, OR poiesis, Tim Shaw, Jacek Smolicki, Marko Pogačnik, Neja Tomšič and Brane Zorman.

TO)pot gathers artists, theorists and curious walkers to bring them closer to walking and listening as a spatial acting-out of the place and the body; as practices of reading, creating, grounding, immersing, being acted upon and acting in the environment; as ways of experiencing our myriads entanglements and interdependencies with other human and non-human beings and the world.

EVENT REGISTRATION TICKETS  PURCHASE

Registration for the Globoka hiša audio walk at kristina.jermancic@cd-cc.si.
Mandatory registration for all sound walks and workshops (€2 contribution at the location).
Ticket purchase for the Sleep Concert (10€).

         DAILY PROGRAMME

TO)pot is a festival of sound walks, events, workshops, and reflections exploring listening and walking as relational practices. In a condensed timeframe, when the atmosphere clears and summer turns to autumn, the festival traverses familiar and lesser-known spaces, urban places and trails through different formats and projects.

With its three-day programme and several pre-festival events in different locations, TO)pot 2023 presents soundwalk by artists, researchers and thinkers. Their projects engage with sites – their materialities, acoustics, history, ecologies, their social and political life – by bringing the body on the move, displacing our attention, inviting us to join collective actions, making unheard phenomena audible, challenging the politics of the body in public space, listening to or voicing with more-than-human subjects… An invitation to explore our relationships with the environment through different approaches, frameworks and perspectives, as well as a variety of forms, tools, spaces and times.

TO)pot opens with a discursive program where research on walking, listening, their histories and critical relevance today takes different forms: a peripatetic lecture by Aldo Milohnić, a sound composition by Jacek Smolicki presenting his book Soundwalking. Through Time, Space, and Technologies (Routledge 2023), an itinerary through Elena Biserna’s anthology Going Out. Walking, Listening, Soundmaking (umland 2022), and a talk by Ida Hiršenfelder drawing on her text Exercises in Listening to the Inaudible (Acoustic Commons, Cona 2022) on listening, location and the way bodies move in time and space. These discussions provide a backdrop for the walks, installations, concerts, performances and workshops presented at the festival, offering space to exchange on some of the themes, methodologies and issues they deal with.

Some of the artists focus on our perception of the environment. With his soundwalk Ambulation, Tim Shaw translates field recording techniques into a live and site-responsive improvisation with places through microphones and sensors, allowing him to capture acoustic sounds and electromagnetic waves to remix them in real-time. Boštjan Perovšek’s The Eye that Hears the Past addresses perceptive environmental dissociation and synaesthesia, relating them to the disconnection between individuals and their natural environment.

Other projects have strong ecological engagement notes. Untangling a Garden, the installation and performance-in-progress by Neja Tomšič presented on the opening night, combines the imaginations of two parks: one of the first exotic parks in Slovenia (Rafutski Park) and the speculative park of the so-called Alexandria women in Alexandria. Also located in a park, Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman’s soundwalk garden GOround highlights the difficult relationship between humans and plants through the context of the colonial dispersal of plants. Another form of engagement is the exploration of communication within and across species, as in Catherine Clover’s Larking, a site-specific project based on scores of different migratory birds’ songs in the Ljubljana area and their collective activation through a cross-species itinerant choir.

Our attention to the environment can also be explored through our material interactions with the ground and the acoustic features of urban space, as in katrinem’s BesenBallett – a social sculpture and a collective choreography where an everyday tool such as the broom becomes an expanded instrument. It can also become a tool to question (and challenge) power relations among bodies in public space; in her video Encouragements presented at Cukrarna, Anna Raimondo gives voice to a collective body: she infiltrates the city with messages of empowerment by wandering around while simulating a phone conversation and voicing encouragements collected through a network of women. Amanda Gutiérrez and Elena Biserna also embrace this feminist approach to explore (auditory) situated experiences based on gender and sexuality while walking at night. In collaboration with the City of Women festival, they will activate different collective projects based on written scores and protocols to reclaim listening and sounding agency in the city at night.

The time frame of the night also resonates in the content and the form of Alja Petric’s SLEEP CONCERT, engaging in its temporalities, (sound) activities, and the oscillations between rest and sleep. On the festival’s final evening, this immersive experience invites us to spend the night together at Cukrarna, listening while gradually slipping from wakefulness to abandon and back.

TO)pots programme is curated by Elena Biserna and Irena Pivka. The festival is organised by Cona in collaboration with Cukrarna Gallery.  Amanda Gutiérrez’s project partner is the City of Women festival.

COLOPHON

Curators and introductory text: Elena Biserna, Irena Pivka
Translation into Slovene and proofreading: Melita Silič
English proofreading of the main festival text: Ana Čavić
Main visual: Ajdin Bašić, Matej Tomažin
Design: Matej Tomažin
Technical support: Brane Zorman, Martin Lovšin and the Cukrarna techical team
Coordination for Cukrarna: Eva Bolha, Alenka Trebušak
Production: Irena Pivka, Matej Tomažin, Brane Zorman
Coproduction: Cukrarna Gallery / MGML
Amanda Gutierrez’s project partner: the City of Women Festival
Coproduction of pre-festival event Jata C – Chronolith: Ljubljana Castle
Production of the work Globoka Hiša: Cankarjev Dom

The artist walk by Marko Pogačnik links the TO)pot festival with Now is here, Maska. The work Garden GOround is a part of the VITAL project. Special thanks to Concordia University, Marmor Hotavlje, Abandoned Plants Sanctuary, Javni sklad republike Slovenije za kulturne dejavnosti, Društvo za opazovanje in proučevanje ptic Slovenije, Gledališče Ane Monro, the City of Ljubljana, Department for Protection, Rescue and Civil Defense.